Painter Tim Woodman revisits & re-visions the classics in new Provincetown show

Wednesday

Jul 10, 2013 at 12:01 AMJul 10, 2013 at 10:11 AM

For a while, “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling obsession over the hunt for a white whale, was Tim Woodman’s Moby Dick. The artist created a painted panel to represent each of the novel’s 135 chapters, plus freestanding metal sculptures of major characters. More recently, Woodman’s subject was the hunt by French memoirist Marcel Proust.

Susan Rand Brown

For a while, “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling obsession over the hunt for a white whale, was Tim Woodman’s Moby Dick. The artist created a painted panel to represent each of the novel’s 135 chapters, plus freestanding metal sculptures of major characters. More recently, Woodman’s subject was the hunt by French memoirist Marcel Proust, whose obsession with unlocking keys to childhood memory inspired Woodman to create 265 small paintings, each with a single image — a little church, a solitary crow — honoring what Proust did in seven hefty volumes.

A dozen pieces from Woodman’s potentially open-ended series, “Tim’s Museum,” open with a reception from 8 to 10 p.m. Friday, July 12, at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. The show features exquisite wall-hanging, low-relief sculptures made of hand-cut, riveted and painted aluminum that begins with an iconic painting and takes off from there

The well of Woodman’s sources includes Picasso, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rousseau and especially Matisse — all iconic 20th century figures. Donatello, the 15th century Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor, is Woodman’s original inspiration and still-favorite artist.

Early in Woodman’s art education at Cornell University, he spent a semester traveling in Italy. When he encountered Donatello’s innovative carved panels done for church interiors in Siena and Padua, it was an epiphany.

“I was instantly captivated by the technique of bas-relief,” Woodman says, seated on an armless plastic chair in the Merola Gallery with his own sculptural paintings within arm’s reach, a shallow relief sculpture with three-dimensionality, but also the perspective and illusion used in two-dimensional painting where the space is compressed.

“Starting with monochrome materials and then gradually adding paint, from that point my work has been — with few exceptions — involved with relief. I call it relief sculpture,” he says.

After earning an MFA from Yale University in the mid-1970s, Woodman moved to the Tribeca area of Manhattan, sharing an upper-floor loft with the artist Helen Miranda Wilson, his long-time partner. (The two met at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Art in 1970). Hot and cold running water was iffy, but Woodman was showing his work almost non-stop, beginning with a show at the highly regarded Zabriskie Gallery and noticed by Hilton Kramer, New York’s dean of art critics.

“If you were a young artist and had a gallery, chances are you’d get noticed on some level. I was lucky to be in New York at that time,” Woodman says with characteristic modesty.

Twenty years later, the area was gentrified and many artists were forced out. “When we lost our lease,” he says, “we moved to Wellfleet full-time, where Helen had grown up and where we were spending summers.” That was 13 years ago. “It’s freeing to not be in the public eye as an artist, the way you would be in New York,” he says. “There’s a certain liberation to being secluded.

“The landscape here is stunning — the water, the light. I decided at age 48 that I wanted to surf. I was terrible for a couple of months. I’d just fall off. It’s one of those things you have to teach yourself.”

Unique and painstaking, his version of relief sculpture is also something Woodman had to teach himself. With “Tim’s Museum,” a title suggesting his curatorial role, “I can, using all the skills I have, make my own versions of the paintings, and it’s an opportunity to get to know the individual works,” he says.

“I’m not using any mechanical process in these works, no enlargements or reductions: I decide on the scale I want my work to be.” Woodman’s pitch rises. “I am measuring with a ruler, and drawing the pieces. So with each element, I am actually drawing with my hand,” he says.

Woodman stands to face his relief sculpture, a work that honors Matisse’s “Red Studio” while making something fascinating and original in concept and execution. “With this chair,” he says, pointing to a hummingbird-sized layering, as subtle as a Donatello, of metal, tiny rivets and paint, part of an overall tableau of small objects on a red ground, “I figured out how long it should be, and how wide and I drew it, eventually transferring the drawing to a piece of aluminum that I could then cut and paint.

“Don’t suggest that I become Matisse, but at least I get to appreciate the paintings on another level — for my pleasure.” At “Tim’s Museum,” the door to Woodman’s original epiphany in Italy many decades ago remains wide open.

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